On average, a person looks at their mobile communications device about 150 times a day, or every 6.5 minutes. This constant attention to one device provides a great opportunity to get the right information to people at the right time. And the desire for health information is obvious as health care related mobile app downloading has proliferated with constant year-over-year growth. In 2011, a Deloitte survey found that 65 percent of respondents considered online access to their health important.
In addition to this “bottom up” interest, “top down” money has been poured in—from the federal government. Take the FCC, just one government actor in the health tech space, which announced earlier this year that $400 million would be available to health care providers to create and expand their telemedicine networks nationwide, linking urban medical centers to rural clinics while providing greater access to medical specialists and instant access to electronic health records.
For example, the FCC first launched the Rural Health Program in 1996, “to better understand how to support high-speed networks.” Criticism has continued to mount. The American Hospital Association and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the FCC had not done nearly enough to understand and connect with the needs of health care providers. Even the FCC’s own mHealth Task Force said that the FCC was not doing enough to enable health tech. And the FCC’s announcement of new spending for the program this year said, "For years, the FCC's primary healthcare program made it difficult for hospitals serving rural patients to get high bandwidth connections needed for modern telemedicine by limiting the services eligible for funding, and by making it hard for consortia to effectively bargain for the lowest cost service.”
So why have we not seen resounding success? Why is there no clear path for widespread rapid adoption of health tech? The answer is pretty simple, it is a lack of agency focus.
Even as the new spending was being announced Chairman Genachowski stated that the new funding will expand to include more urban programs because he wants to expand the “focus” of the program beyond tethering rural centers to rural clinics to help the rural providers. So, instead of making sure that the challenges of serving a rural population are smoothed out, the FCC’s attention is being drawn elsewhere.
Whether one agrees with the federal government throwing money at health tech or not, government needs to stay focused instead of wasting years of money and opportunity while sending confusing signals to the marketplace dissuading private sector investment.
April 29, 2013